This paper estimates the health dimension of the welfare cost of homicides in Brazil incorporating age, gender, educational, and regional heterogeneities. We use a marginal willingness to pay approach to assign monetary values to the welfare cost of increased mortality due to violence. Results indicate that the present discounted value of the welfare cost of homicides in Brazil corresponds to roughly 78% of the GDP or, in terms of yearly flow, 2.3%. The analysis also shows that reliance on aggregate data to perform such calculations can lead to biases of around 20% in the estimated social cost of violence.

The main objective of this study is to quantify racial victimization differential between Blacks and Whites in Brazil, focusing on homicides and physical assaults. Combining socioeconomic data from the Brazilian Household Survey with data from the Mortality Information System, we apply the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition to isolate the racial discrimination component from the social indicators correlated with homicides and physical assaults. Findings indicate that only part of the victimization differential between Blacks and Whites is explained by structural attributes. A significant portion of this differential (at least 40%) for both homicides and physical assaults persists as evidence of racial discrimination. In addition, both for homicides and physical assaults, a more discriminatory scenario is observed in the North and Northeast regions of Brazil, regions historically characterized by higher social inequalities and violent mortality.

In Brazil, young Black males are far more likely to experience criminal violence (e.g., homicide, police lethality and assault) than young White males. However, race might also affect the ex-post scenario; that is, Blacks and Whites may go to the police seeking solutions against criminal violence with different probabilities. In this paper, we identified and quantified the sources of the racial differential in accessing justice between Blacks and Whites in Brazil. Using microdata from the Brazilian Household Survey, we used the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to isolate the discriminatory component from social indicators correlated with access to justice. We found that structural attributes explain only part (around 60%) of the racial differential in accessing justice. A significant portion of the discrepancy (at least 40%) provides evidence of racial discrimination. In addition, the spatial dynamics revealed that the Northeast region of Brazil presents the most discriminatory scenario in the country, a region historically characterised by higher social inequalities and violent mortality.